Bios

Liz Rosenberg, Kemala Karmen, and Dionne Grayman are the co-founders of NYCpublic.org. We share a passion for listening to and collaborating with other parents. In addition to caring deeply about our own children’s educational experiences (between us we have 5 NYC public school students) we are

very focused on creating a more equitable, quality education for all of our city’s children. We also share the common experience of having been teachers working with adult English language learners, incarcerated youth, young mothers, specialized and small school high school students, and students at the Harvey Milk School.

A few years ago we made our first foray into public-school parent organizing. We formed a group with six other parents from diverse districts and set out to convince the DoE that centralizing kindergarten admissions was bad for schools, parents, and kids. The scope of our actions included researching a new policy and its impact on a variety of schools and families, amassing 1000+ signatures on a petition, and parleying that petition into meetings with key decision makers at the DoE. And best of all, the policy was changed. Democracy is something that public school parents must have more access to. That’s why we are creating this organization.